“Since my return from America, with the exception of a visit of a few months at Rangoon, I have been occupying my old stand, engaged chiefly in preparing a Burmese dictionary, which is now in the press; that is, the English and Burmese part. The Burmese and English part will, I hope, be ready for the press in the course of another year. They will make two quarto volumes of five or six hundred pages each.... I am still hard at work on the dictionary, and shall be for above a year to come, if I live so long. The work will make two volumes quarto, containing above a thousand pages. No one can tell what toil it has cost me. But I trust it will be a valuable and standard work for a long time. It sweetens all toil to be conscious that we are laboring for the King of kings, the Lord of lords. I doubt not we find it so, whether in Maulmain or in Philadelphia.”...
“I have taken shelter in the house lately occupied by brother Simons, though remote from missionary operations, where I intend to make an effort to finish the dictionary.”
His wife, in one of her letters, thus describes his indefatigable industry:
“_July 18, 1849._
.... “‘The goodman’ works like a galley slave; and really it quite distresses me sometimes, but he seems to get fat on it, so I try not to worry. He walks—or rather _runs_—like a boy over the hills, a mile or two every morning; then down to his books, scratch-scratch, puzzle-puzzle, and when he gets deep in the mire, out on the veranda with your humble servant by his side, walking and talking (kan-ing we call it in the Burman) till the point is elucidated, and then down again—and so on till ten o’clock in the evening. It is this _walking_ which is keeping him out of the grave.”
At the same time he took a general oversight of the mission work in Maulmain, being, in the nature of the case, a guiding and inspiring force. He preached occasionally in the native chapel, “one sermon at least every Lord’s day.” When his beloved fellow-missionary, Mr. Haswell, was compelled to return home for a short visit on account of his ill health, the whole care of the native church devolved on him.
These literary and pastoral labors were, however, lightened by social and domestic pleasures. Though he had come to the ripe age of sixty, he had within him the fresh heart of a boy. It has been truly said of him that his spirit was intensely, unconquerably youthful. He loved to romp with his children, and early in the morning to brush
“With hasty steps the dew away.”
In a life of self-sacrifice he had discovered the perennial fountain of joy. While he followed the narrow path of stern duty, the butterfly pleasure which the worldling chases from flower to flower, had flown into his bosom. Byron, on his thirty-ninth birthday, breathed the sigh:
“My days are in the yellow leaf, The flower and fruits of life are gone; The worm, the canker, and the grief Are mine alone.”
How different Judson’s words uttered on his death-bed:
“I suppose they think me an old man, and imagine it is nothing for one like me to resign a life so full of trials. But I am not old—at least in that sense; you know I am not. Oh, no man ever left the world with more inviting prospects, with brighter hopes, or warmer feelings—warmer feelings.”
We are indebted for the following description of his personal appearance at this time to Dr. Wayland’s Memoir:
“In person, Dr. Judson was of about the medium height, slenderly built, but compactly knitted together. His complexion was in youth fair; but residence in India had given him the sallow hue common to that climate. His hair, when in this country, was yet of a fine chestnut, with scarcely a trace of gray. The elasticity of his movement indicated a man of thirty, rather than of nearly sixty years of age. His deportment was, in a remarkable degree, quiet and self-possessed, and his manner was pointed out as perfectly well bred, by those who consider the cultivation of social accomplishments the serious business of life. A reviewer writes on this subject as follows: